to partake of it. They began with a
reluctant and sorrowful confession; they deplored the stains which
tarnished the lustre of a good cause. After keeping a decent time of
retirement, in a few days crept out an apology for the excesses of men
cruelly irritated by the attacks of unjust power. Grown bolder, as the
first feeling of mankind decayed and the color of these horrors began to
fade upon the imagination, they proceeded from apology to defence. They
urged, but still deplored, the absolute necessity of such a proceeding.
Then they made a bolder stride, and marched from defence to
recrimination. They attempted to assassinate the memory of those whose
bodies their friends had massacred, and to consider their murder as a
less formal act of justice. They endeavored even to debauch our pity,
and to suborn it in favor of cruelty. They wept over the lot of those
who were driven by the crimes of aristocrats to republican vengeance.
Every pause of their cruelty they considered as a return of their
natural sentiments of benignity and justice. Then they had recourse to
history, and found out all the recorded cruelties that deform the annals
of the world, in order that the massacres of the Regicides might pass
for a common event, and even that the most merciful of princes, who
suffered by their hands, should bear the iniquity of all the tyrants who
have at any time infested the earth. In order to reconcile us the better
to this republican tyranny, they confounded the bloodshed of war with
the murders of peace; and they computed how much greater prodigality of
blood was exhibited in battles and in the storm of cities than in the
frugal, well-ordered massacres of the revolutionary tribunals of France.

As to foreign powers, so long as they were conjoined with Great Britain
in this contest, so long they were treated as the most abandoned
tyrants, and, indeed, the basest of the human race. The moment any of
them quits the cause of this government, and of all governments, he is
rehabilitated, his honor is restored, all attainders are purged. The
friends of Jacobins are no longer despots; the betrayers of the common
cause are no longer traitors.

That you may not doubt that they look on this war as a civil war, and
the Jacobins of France as of their party, and that they look upon us,
though locally their countrymen, in reality as enemies, they have never
failed to run a parallel between our late civil war and this war with
the Jaco